


teach your children well

by windupclock



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Kid Fic, M/M, a&c adopt the antichrist, well. adopt... kidnap... same thing really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-05-15 01:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19285588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupclock/pseuds/windupclock
Summary: It may help to understand human affairs to know that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.Sometimes, in very rare cases, those people happen to be demons.(or: Crowley and Aziraphale accidentally adopt the Antichrist. Neither of them are thrilled about this.)





	1. Chapter 1

The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness was asleep in the back of Crowley’s Bentley.

This was inconvenient for multiple reasons. For one, this was the _spawn of Satan_ , asleep in Crowley’s Bentley. The Bentley was hardly a place for children, let alone demonic children, who could probably do things like set it on fire with their eyes, and Crowley was vaguely terrified that every sharp turn he took would send the basket hurtling to the ground and the Antichrist would start raining hellfire down on his beloved car.

For another, Crowley was afraid to play his music at his usual volume for fear of waking the baby. It wasn’t that Crowley was exceptionally eager to listen to  _ Best of Queen  _ again, for the nineteenth time that week, but he didn’t like the silence in the car without it. He could hear himself think. It was exceedingly distressing.

Only slightly more distressing than Crowley hearing himself think at all were the contents of Crowley’s thoughts. An abhorrent percentage of them contained words like _fair_ or _cruel_ or _sentencing his own child to a life of living in the wrong world and not understanding what he is until he has to bring the world to its knees_ , which was never a good sign.

The last time Crowley had had thoughts like these (along the first two lines, that is; he hadn’t yet had occasion for the third), he had ended up in Hell. 

Understandably, he wasn’t excited to see what came from these thoughts. It was entirely possible, knowing the universe, that there was some fun and exciting level below Hell that he would fall to next. Smiting. It would probably be smiting.

The thing was, though… well, the thing was that it seemed like child abandonment on Satan’s part, and Crowley had never quite been able to stomach things like that. He remembers the visceral anger he’d felt when he realized the Lord was going to kill the children in the flood; it had never really left him, in all the years since, and he’d been stuck with an annoying and inconvenient tingling of conscience around them ever since, likely as a punishment from the Lord for questioning Her plans. It wouldn’t surprise him. The Lord was petty like that.

Crowley glanced over his shoulder for a moment. The basket had fallen open at some right turn or another, and he could just see half of the baby’s face in the shadows.

The Antichrist really didn’t take after his father.

Crowley was grateful for it. Satan wasn’t exactly a looker.

* * *

There’s a trick they do with three playing cards which is very hard to follow, and, in another universe, it is easy to imagine this taking place on this particular night with three particular golden-haired male babies, one of whom is fated to tear this world apart at the seams. 

This trick would involve the swapping of these infants, such that none of them would end the night in the arms of their rightful parents. Imagine the game where one has to figure out which cup the ping-pong ball is underneath after a minute or so of shuffling, except instead of a cup, it is a child, and instead of a ping-pong ball, it is unfathomable evil and the power to bend reality to his whims. On another plane, this would likely be an apt metaphor for the events of this night.

On this night, however, in this universe, another trick was taking place. This one involves the removal of one card entirely, and its covert replacement with another card on the table. This trick is more commonly known as “cheating at cards”, and Crowley, who spent nearly a decade in the late 18th century in and out of various casinos, was an expert at cheating at cards.

* * *

Crowley pulled into the dinky parking lot of the hospital, parked at a nearly perfect forty-five degree angle, and grabbed the Antichrist from the backseat, hanging the basket on the crook of his elbow. There was a short, inoffensive man hanging around by the door, fiddling with a cigarette. The father, then.

After a brief conversation, during which the father seemed convinced that Crowley was a doctor (despite all evidence to the contrary ‒ did he think most doctors showed up twenty minutes late to a birth? The state of healthcare in this country was truly appalling) and Crowley did little to correct that assumption, he found out that the birth was happening in room three.

* * *

Room three had two occupants: a woman, obviously the mother, who was passed out on the bed and didn’t look like she’d be up for the world anytime soon, and a baby in one of the cots on wheels, swaddled up in a blue blanket. Crowley went over to the baby.

The job was simple enough, in theory. He would take this baby out of the cot, put the Antichrist into the cot, and hand the basket with the spare baby in it over to a nun for disposal. Light work. He’d be home in plenty of time for dinner.

The door creaked open. One of the nuns slipped through and froze when she saw Crowley, her eyes wide. “Oh! Master Crowley! Is that him?”

She came to peer over Crowley’s shoulder at the Antichrist without waiting for an answer, but she wasn’t looking at the basket. She was looking at the cot. At the baby already lying there. The entirely human baby.

“Yep,” Crowley said, before he could even think about it. 

“Huh,” the nun said curiously, tilting her head at the tiny thing among the blankets. “Only I’d expected funny eyes, or teensy-weensy little hoofikins. Or a wittle tail.”

Did the Antichrist have a tail? Crowley glanced down at the basket. He’d have to check later. There was going to be a later with the Antichrist. Today was going _fantastically_.

“It’s definitely him,” Crowley lied.

“Does he look like his daddy? I bet he does,” the nun cooed. “Do you look like your daddy-waddykins?” She tickled the baby’s chin, making it shift its head and make a fussing sound.

Crowley thought of the man with the cigarette outside. “He doesn’t.”

“I’ll let the others know,” the nun promised, glancing up at Crowley. “Oh, I’ve got to get the biscuits as well…” 

The door creaked again. This time it was the father, with a slight sheen of nervous sweat on his pale face. “Has it, uh, happened yet? I’m the husband. Father. Both.”

“Ah, yes, your Ambassadorship,” the nun said brightly, ushering the man towards the cot. “This is your son, from the top of his head to the tips of his hoofy-woofies… which he hasn’t got.”

Crowley left. The basket was still swinging on his arm.

* * *

The problem with spending time around humans is that, sooner or later, you will begin to act like them. This was why Crowley and Aziraphale were some of the only angel-stock creatures who spent the majority of their time on Earth rather than in their respective domains; the rest of them were too afraid of going native.

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale would ever willingly admit it, but they already had.

The proof of this was in that stubborn tinglings of a conscience Crowley had grown somewhere around six and a half thousand years ago, right before he had found himself sauntering downwards, with which he had infected Aziraphale a millennia or so later. That strange sense of ethics was what had kept Crowley from handing the Antichrist over.

The creature couldn’t hold his own head up, and Crowley was supposed to relinquish it to the powers of fate, to do Someone-knows-what for eleven years before bringing the Earth to an end. Despite Crowley’s best intentions, he was fond of both the Earth and the children on it, and this moment was a perfect storm of everything that tempted him to be - Satan forbid it - _nice._

Crowley, like most demons, was not prone to resisting temptation.

* * *

“Call Aziraphale,” Crowley grunted, settling the Antichrist down on the passenger seat.

“Calling Aziraphale,” his car said cheerfully. The line rang for a second, and then: “Sorry, all lines to London are currently busy.”

Crowley banged his head against the steering wheel several times. Aziraphale always said that evil contained the seeds of its own destruction — or, at the very least, its own mild inconvenience — and Crowley was beginning to concede that he might possibly have the slightest inkling of a point when he did.

* * *

Forty minutes spent in various stages of panic later, Crowley pulled up outside of Aziraphale’s bookshop. He swept inside, ignoring the  _ Closed  _ sign, and found Aziraphale at his desk, looking up with a frown that died the moment he saw Crowley. “What have you got there?” he asked, tilting his head at the basket. There was a brightness in his eyes that Crowley really, really hated having to squash.

“The Antichrist,” he said as nonchalantly as he could, setting the basket on the edge of Aziraphale’s desk.

“Excuse me?” Aziraphale said, in the tone that he used when he was really, really hoping something Crowley had said was a joke. It never was.

“The Adversary. Destroyer of Kings. Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Great Beast that is called—”

“Yes, thank you, I know what the Antichrist is,” Aziraphale snapped, gingerly touching the basket as if it might explode at any second. “Why is it in my _bookshop_?”

“Well. I sort of kidnapped him.”

“You did _what_?”

Crowley sighed and raked a hand through his hair. It wasn’t a difficult concept to grasp. “I kidnapped him,” he repeated. “Abducted him. Carried him off.” He trailed off, mostly because he couldn’t think of any other synonyms for kidnapping, and partly because Aziraphale looked like he might discorporate on the spot.

“ _Why_?” 

Crowley shrugged. “Direct action?” he offered.

“Please let this be a dream,” Aziraphale muttered, dropping his head into his hands and massaging his temples with his thumbs.

“Afraid not,” Crowley said. This was the exact moment when the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings and all of that, decided to start wailing like the unholy offspring of an ambulance and a foghorn.

Dear Lord, what had Crowley gotten himself into?

* * *

“What are we meant to…  _ do  _ with it?” Aziraphale hissed, his eyes darting towards the basket like the infant might overhear them.

“He’s not an it,” Crowley pointed out, rolling his eyes (which was, tragically, not the most effective move when one had snake pupils, and also wore sunglasses nearly constantly). “He’s a he. At least, he is according to Satan,” he added thoughtfully. “Can’t imagine Satan’s got any grasp on gender, really. We’ll say he’s a he until otherwise noted.”

Aziraphale’s face was downright ruddy. In any other situation, Crowley would have delighted in that look; as it was, he just felt vaguely guilty. “ _We_ are not going to say anything,” Aziraphale said, with not an insignificant touch of desperation in his voice. “Crowley, we have to get rid of him.”

“Oi!” Crowley yelped. “He can hear you!”

“He is a _day old._ "

“I thought we already had this argument,” Crowley continued, ignoring Aziraphale entirely. “A few thousand years ago, at least. I mean, antediluvian. You can’t kill kids, Aziraphale.”

“No one said anything about killing! I was going to suggest we leave him at an orphanage, or… foster care, or some such. Dear Lord, Crowley.”

“You want to leave the Antichrist, the child who is going to bring about the end of days in eleven years, to grow up in an orphanage? Alone? Think that through, angel.” He paused for dramatic effect, watching how Aziraphale’s brows drew in, a clear sign that he was about to admit that Crowley was right. “If we leave him like that, that’s it. The world’s ending. There’s nothing we can do. But, you know, if the both of us are around him while he grows up, maybe… maybe we can do something.”

“Do something?”

Crowley shrugged. “Have… influence. I’ll nudge him towards the darkness, you’ll be there to nudge him back to the light. Hopefully…”

“He ends up somewhere in the middle.”

“Not good.”

“Not evil.”

“Normal,” Crowley finished. He grinned at Aziraphale. The angel held out for another moment, his expression uncertain, but then the tension bled out of his shoulders in a split second, and he nodded.

“Normal,” Aziraphale echoed.

* * *

Getting a baby to settle down to sleep turned out to be several orders of magnitude more difficult than Crowley had expected. 

There wasn’t so much as a crib in Aziraphale’s bookshop, shockingly enough, and the angel had solemnly shaken his head when Crowley asked about an empty drawer, so the Antichrist was still in the basket. It made Crowley feel sinister — or more sinister than usual, at any rate — like they were planning to have him as the main course of a picnic. The top was propped open, though, so they could make sure he was still breathing. Crowley didn’t know if they could forget, but he wouldn’t put it past him.

When he’d been silent for long enough that they were reasonably sure he wasn’t about to scream his lungs out, Aziraphale slumped into his chair and Crowley sagged back against the desk, murmuring  _ shit shit shit  _ repeatedly under his breath.

“We don’t know how to raise a child, Crowley,” Aziraphale said eventually, voicing the obvious.

Crowley was silent for a long moment, and then burst out: “Books!”

“What?”

“Books, angel. Nobody actually knows how to do this. They just read books about it so they can pretend they do.”

“I very much doubt that,” Aziraphale muttered, but he didn’t look convinced.

“It’s true,” Crowley said, with great conviction. “I saw it on a sitcom.”

Aziraphale gave him a suspicious look. “Didn’t you invent those?”

Crowley beamed with pride.

* * *

“Oh, Heavens,” Aziraphale said, entirely out of the blue. It was the morning of the day on which the Antichrist had been on Earth for three weeks. During this time, a shelf in the bookshop had become devoted to parenting books, and they had both performed a stunning amount of miracles to avoid actually changing his diaper. “We have to give him a name.”

Crowley stared down at the hellspawn that was asleep in his lap. The Antichrist spent an abhorrent amount of the day sleeping, which Crowley found unfair for several reasons: for one, he had never been allowed to sleep for that long (excepting, of course, the late 19th century, which had been a well-earned vacation), and for another, neither of them could quite manage to sleep when he was sleeping. They didn’t need to sleep, per se, but it was annoying to be deprived of the option.

Apart from sleeping, the Antichrist didn’t do much. He seemed to be exactly like every other three-week-old in existence in that regard, which Crowley shouldn’t have been surprised by. He was meant to have been raised by a human couple, after all. They might have got suspicious if he had started flying before his first birthday.

(Assuming he would be able to fly eventually, that is. Crowley was holding out hope that he would.)

“Do we?” Crowley replied, looking at his tiny, twisted-up face. He was less wrinkled then than he had been three weeks ago, but still more wrinkled than Crowley would prefer. He didn’t seem like anything that was ready for a name. “No one gave us names and we turned out fine.”

“We were created being able to speak, Crowley, it’s hardly the same. What are we supposed to do when other people ask what his name is?”

“Other people?”

Aziraphale gave Crowley one of his patented (quite literally; Crowley had worked a few miracles in the patents office sometime around the invention of the telephone) exasperated looks. “Yes. Doctors and teachers and… friends and such. Other people.”

Other people were not a concept that had factored into this for Crowley. In the few coherent thoughts he’d entertained before he brought Satan's son to Aziraphale’s bookshop to propose that they co-parent, it had only ever been him and Aziraphale. Frankly, Crowley had never needed anything else. He hadn’t imagined a child would either, but that wasn’t right. Crowley was rapidly becoming aware that children needed a metric fuckton of things, and it did make sense that other humans would be somewhere on that list.

“Right,” Crowley said eventually. “Er… Jeff?”

Aziraphale gave him a flat look. “Jeff?”

“Yes.”

“We are not naming ou- the Antichrist Jeff, for Heaven’s sake,” Aziraphale said, his voice weary. “The other children will bully him.”

“Well, then, how about… Haman? Herod? Ramses?” Each of these suggestions was met with a firm shake of Aziraphale’s head. “ _Cain_?” 

“Absolutely not! We’re trying to discourage him becoming a murderer!”

“ _You’re_ trying to discourage him becoming a murderer,” Crowley muttered, grimacing. “You pick a name, then, if all of mine are too infernal for your tastes.”

Aziraphale leaned over and studied the Adversary’s features. He looked much like every other baby humans had ever produced, with a scrunched little button of a nose and lovely chubby cheeks. There was something in his face, however, that vaguely reminded Aziraphale of a face from thousands of years ago. The first face.

It did seem fitting that the storied destroyer of humanity should have the same name as its progenitor. Like bookends. Aziraphale had always been a fan of symmetry.

“Adam,” he said, with finality. Crowley groaned, but Aziraphale ignored him. “Adam,” he repeated in a murmur, brushing a hand over the baby’s bald head. “That’s you.”


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley bounced Adam in his arms as he paced along the crowded corridors of the bookshop. He hummed a quiet little tune to him, some vague lullaby he’d picked up somewhere and lost the words to along the way.

The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up self-consciously. He looked up to find Aziraphale curled on the corner of the couch, staring at him with a soft smile, the corners of his eyes creased.

“What are you staring at?” Crowley asked, shifting the baby in his arms. Adam murmured out his discontent.

“You, my dear,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley blushed despite himself.

Adam stirred and started to fuss again, his tiny hand thumping against Crowley’s chest. “Give him here,” Aziraphale said, holding his hands out.

The baby reached out for Aziraphale as Crowley handed him over, settling into the crook of Aziraphale’s shoulder as Aziraphale curled a hand around his back. “Oh, hello,” Aziraphale murmured, smiling down at Adam. “How are you, my dear?”

“Excellent,” answered Crowley.

* * *

 Crowley backed away from the bassinet, his hands raised in silent victory. Adam snored out a tiny, heartbreaking snuffle as he settled down into sleep. At that exact moment, the heel of Crowley’s book caught on a stray book, and he slipped and tumbled catastrophically to the ground, knocking several stacks of books over in the process with a cartoonish clash.

Adam immediately began to wail.

Aziraphale appeared in the doorway a second later, wringing his hands frantically at his waist. “Are you alright, dear boy?”

“Oh, you know,” Crowley said from where he was lying flat on the ground, limbs akimbo. “Doing swimmingly. Figured I’d give being horizontal a try.”

Aziraphale tutted at him and scooped Adam up into his arms, bouncing him gently and smoothing a hand over his red, scrunched-up cheeks. Crowley struggled to a sitting position, propping himself up on his elbows and groaning.

“This isn’t working,” Crowley said. He raked a hand through his hair.

Aziraphale frowned. “This?” he asked, a hint of worry in his voice. His eyes flicked down to the baby who was quieting down in the crook of his arm, and he slowly set him back down in his bassinet, tucking his onesie up under his chin. The bookshop was empty except for them; it had been for weeks, the door firmly locked and the phone unplugged from the wall. They had abandoned even the barest pretense of operation.

Crowley shook his head immediately. “Not this, angel,” he reassured. He followed Aziraphale’s line of sight towards Adam, and a smile bloomed across his face. “Nah, trust me. Not this. It’s just… y’know, it’s a little cramped in here.”

“Well, yes, now that you mention it…”

“Can’t really imagine him, you know, taking his first steps here. Or being able to play with his toys without, you know. Whole of books falling on him.”

“No, I don’t imagine he could.” There was a tiny, shy smile curling Aziraphale’s lips now, the sight of which made Crowley’s heart horrendously warm.

“Which is why… I think we should move,” Crowley said, very quickly. “You know. Somewhere we can be a proper family.”

“A proper family,” Aziraphale echoed slowly, his eyes bright.

“Or, you know, not, if you don’t want that, I–“

Aziraphale cut him off with a fond roll of his eyes. “Of course I want that, my dear. To be clear, you mean… you mean all in, yes? Official – well, official fatherhood?”

Crowley nodded.

Before his head could even get back to its resting position, there were warm arms thrown around his stomach, and he was pulled into Aziraphale’s tender embrace. He wound his arms around Aziraphale’s shoulders, tucked his head atop the angel’s, and pressed his smile down into his crop of blond curls.

“You’ll have to miracle up the adoption forms, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale murmured against Crowley’s shoulder. “I got an official warning about my egregious overuse this morning.”

“Did you send them back a strongly worded letter about all the holy work you’ve been doing?” Crowley teased. “I mean, changing the son of Satan’s nappies, that’s varsity level stuff. I reckon they’d give you an award.”

Aziraphale chuckled. “Take away my wings, more like,” he said, and then fell silent, because it wasn’t especially a joke but neither of them wanted to think about it.

The smart thing to do, Crowley knew, would be to dump Adam off at the nearest bus stop and run screaming in the other direction. Of course, the truly smart thing would have been to step away six thousand years ago when an angel raised his wing to shield him from the rain, but Crowley had well and truly buggered that one already, hadn’t he? And, well. There were risks, of course, but that was probably true of normal parenting as well.

(At least they’d never have to worry about theirs accidentally choking to death or anything like that, thank Satan.)

Besides, Crowley couldn’t run away from this. Not if he tried.

Not from the angel in his arms, and not from the tiny devil snoring in his makeshift crib a few feet away.

His family.

* * *

Family, strictly speaking, was not a concept Heaven or Hell employed.

Heaven had had an idea of it, back in the old days, when the soldiers called each other sibling and had each other’s backs unflinchingly. That was before the Fall, before Crowley followed his brother downwards and ended up buried in the infernal echelons of bureaucracy, without so much as a name left for him to hold onto. Without so much as a brother anymore.

It hadn’t lasted much longer up there, either. It turned out that when half of your army defected to the forces of darkness, the remaining few soldiers didn’t feel quite as fondly towards them anymore. They had all turned against each other, and family had slipped away, another casualty of the first war.

They certainly didn’t have children.

(Well, except for the giants, which had been a mistake on every part. Crowley was happy to admit that one. It had been a major loss.)

This was unprecedented territory for angel stock, really, but Crowley had never been especially good at being a soldier of Heaven, and he wasn’t much better as an employee of Hell.

One thing he was excellent at, however, was being Crowley.

And Crowley, if he was being quite honest (which he rarely was), had known who his family was since one brisk October morning in Eden, when an angel’s wing had kept the first rain off of him.

* * *

They moved into a cottage in South Downs a week later.

It was a lovely place – more than lovely; it edged on enchanting, like it had been brought to life out of a storybook, with a thatched roof and thick vines of ivy creeping along the stone walls, like Mother Nature was trying to drag it back down into the ground. It had a chimney with a curl of smoke hazing from it, planters tucked into the windows, and there was an apple tree in the yard that had sprouted its first leaves of the spring, and, most importantly, Aziraphale’s eyes had lit up when he’d seen it, and he’d glanced over at Crowley in that half-guilty, half-gleeful way he did, and Crowley had caved like a damn house of cards.

(It really was such a stroke of good fortune that the previous owners had decided to move to Italy just the week before.)

* * *

Babies, as it turned out, needed all sorts of _things_.

They had been scraping along with miracles as it was, because no one downstairs really cared enough to put a lid on the amount of miracles Crowley was allowed to pull, but there was an end to how long that would work. They could hardly keep miracling up formula until he was ready to be weaned, after all.

There was an endless litany of things Adam would need: proper cribs and toys and formula and eventually nasty mushed food, one day, and high chairs and diapers and wipes, and the clothes, fuck, the _clothes_.

The problem with baby clothing was that there was so much of it and all of it was horrendously adorable. Crowley had half a mind to send a note to Hell about it. There were tiny onesies and shirts and itty-bitty shoes, two pairs of which could fit in the palm of Crowley’s hand, and he was not going to survive to see the end of the world. He was going to be permanently discorporated in the baby section of a department store, and he was mostly alright with that fate.

Adam turned out to have rather strong opinions on fashion. He cried whenever they tried to squeeze him into anything red (which Aziraphale, beaming, took as a sign that his ethereal influence was working to balance the spawn of Satan out, until Crowley reminded him that Adam also cried whenever he farted). He did, however, suit blue and green immensely.

* * *

“What is he meant to call us?” Crowley asked.

They were sitting across from each other at the little breakfast table, just big enough for three, and Adam was asleep in the other room. There was, of course, a baby monitor on the center of the table, because as much as Adam was the Antichrist and essential to the fabric of the Great Plan and all, neither of them trusted the universe like that.

Aziraphale frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, y’know… when he gets words, whenever that happens, he’s got to call us something,” Crowley said, gesturing with his fork and pretending like he hadn’t memorized every timeline of developmental milestones he could find. Aziraphale elected to humor him in this. “What’ll it be?”

“Er.” Aziraphale fiddled with his silverware for a moment. “I don’t suppose he’ll manage Aziraphale for a while.”

“No,” Crowley agreed. He grinned, something a little serpentine in it. “Nor Crowley.”

Aziraphale looked up at him, and they locked eyes for a long minute, the silent, soft around the edges style of communication they’d honed over the past handful of millennia.

“I call dad,” said both of them at the exact same time.


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone knew the best place for a clandestine meeting in London was, and always had been, St. James’s Park. Crowley and Aziraphale had been meeting here for quite some time, ever since the park had been established, and they had been responsible for a shocking percentage of accidental duck deaths (three-quarters) and subsequent resurrections (nearly one hundred percent) in the years since.

On this day, however, Crowley and Aziraphale were not here for a clandestine meeting. As it turned out, St. James’s Park was also the best place for a family walk with one’s adopted Satanic son on a Sunday morning, and it was for that purpose that they were there, stroller in tow.

Crowley was pushing it—or, rather, he had been pushing it, but he had drawn to a dramatic stop a second ago to glare at Aziraphale. “We are not letting him watch Peppa Pig,” he said, scathingly.

Aziraphale sighed, loud and put-upon. “Why _not_?”

“The pig’s got two eyes no matter how she turns her face.” Crowley shuddered. “I don’t like it. What’s the implication there? Pigs haven’t got four eyes, angel. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense,” said Aziraphale. “It’s a children’s program. Pigs don’t talk, either, Crowley, but I don’t see you complaining about that.”

“Oh, I’ll complain about that,” said Crowley, who was never one to back down from a challenge, even one that had not actually been posed. “Why’ve kids shows always got talking animals in them? That’s just setting the poor bastards up for disappointment. Wait till they see a real pig. There’ll be riots, I tell you.”

“It’s an _allegory_ ,” Aziraphale said primly.

“You’re an allegory,” Crowley muttered. He returned to pushing, pointing out a duck by the side of the pond to Adam, who regarded it with the cool detachment of a four-month-old. “Look at that, Adam. Nature. You’re going to destroy that one day, aren’t you, peanut?”

A woman walking in the opposite direction gave them a strange look out of the corner of her eye. Crowley waved cheerfully at her.

“Peanut?” Aziraphale murmured.

Crowley blushed slightly and elbowed him in the side.  “Not a word.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Aziraphale said, raising his hands. 

* * *

The first time Adam laughed, Crowley nearly passed out.

Adam was four months, one week, and three days old on the occasion, which they never quite forgot because Aziraphale had taken a picture of the incident and pinned it up on the wall, captioned with the date in Aziraphale’s curly scrawl and Adam’s age on the back. Unfortunately, Aziraphale was not a terribly skilled photographer, so the picture was blurry and not quite focused on either of their faces, but they were nevertheless both quite fond of it. 

(Adam, for his part, ended up disliking it immensely, mostly out of a deep-seated urge to rebel, and would blush furiously whenever it was mentioned.) 

They were playing peek-a-boo, which was a shockingly delightful game, even if Adam wasn’t very good at it yet. Crowley’s favorite way to play peek-a-boo was to forego the whole hiding-behind-one’s-hands thing and just turn himself proper invisible for a moment and let Adam sort it out, but Aziraphale frowned on that (“Do you _want_ him to never understand object permanence, dear?”), so Crowley mostly stuck to the regular kind.

“Where’s Crowley?” he asked, clasping his hands over his face. “Where’d he go? Where’s Dad?”

Adam babbled happily, kicking his feet. Crowley dropped his hands and leaned in, crowing “Peekaboo!”, and Adam _giggled_. He broke out into a fit of giggles more precious than anything Crowley had heard in the last few thousand years, and Crowley melted.

There was the click of a camera’s shutter. Crowley glanced up to see Aziraphale, beaming behind his camera, eyes a little wet. “Oh, don’t mind me,” he said with a little wave of his hand. “You go on.”

Crowley ignored this and reached a hand out for Aziraphale’s, grabbing his wrist and tugging. “C’mere, angel,” he urged. Aziraphale went, sitting tailor-fashion on the rug beside them, and Adam gurgled his approval, and Crowley had never been this happy. Crowley had never dreamed of being this happy.

* * *

“Now, dear,” Aziraphale said, his tone somewhere between stern and fond. One hand was holding a spoon, and the other was perched on his hip. His shirt resembled a Jackson Pollock painting with the streaks of food splattered across it. He was facing down an irate Adam, who was not at all in the mood for his carrots. “Let’s be reasonable about this. Two spoonfuls. That’s all I’m asking.”

Adam looked at him, and then looked at the bowl of mushed carrots, and promptly reached out and shoved the bowl onto the floor.

Aziraphale stood there for a moment, his face spattered with sickly orange, while Adam clapped his hands together. “You know, you take after your father,” Aziraphale said regretfully, and discreetly miracled the mess away.

“Ba,” Adam said solemnly, banging one fist against his tray.

“Yes, quite,” Aziraphale agreed. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped Adam’s cheeks clean, tapping him fondly on the nose. “There we go. Much better, isn’t it? Much nicer when we behave with a bit of manners.”

Adam was silent for a long second, and then said, “Papa.”

The handkerchief fell to the ground. “What did you say?” Aziraphale asked, his voice tight.

“Pa,” Adam repeated, underscoring this comment with a wriggle. “Papa.” He reached a chubby hand out for Aziraphale, who took it on instinct and let the baby wrap his fist around one finger, feeling rather faint. 

“Crowley?” he called, craning his neck to look down the hallway to their room. “Come here a minute, love.”

Crowley appeared at the frame of the hallway a second later, looking distinctly ruffled—he’d been napping, Aziraphale guessed, although he was wearing jeans. He ran a hand through his hair and yawned (which was, really, entirely unnecessary, given that he didn’t need to breathe, so it was mostly for show). “What’s up?”

“He said something,” Aziraphale announced proudly. “Right, Adam? What did you say earlier? Can you say it for your dad?”

Adam turned to look at Crowley, regarding him thoughtfully. “Dada,” he said eventually. “Dada.”

Crowley’s mouth fell open. “Did he—was that his first word?” He glanced at Aziraphale, eyes alight with wonderment.

“Well, not ex—” began Aziraphale, but Crowley had already rushed to scoop Adam up into his arms, trying to coax him to say it again, and it wasn’t worth the trouble, really. He’d correct it later.

If he never ended up doing that, well, that was between him and Adam, and Adam wasn’t telling.

* * *

“Fancy a drink?”

Crowley was slumped on the couch, his eyes half-lidded, caught in the pleasant stage just before sleep even though it was hardly nine o’clock at night. It was true what they said—having children ruined you, or at least your sense of fun and appropriate bedtimes. He opened one eye to look at Aziraphale. “I’m listening.”

Aziraphale held up a bottle, bouncing on his toes with a self-satisfied wiggle. Crowley reached for it, turned it over and inspected the label, making an approving noise like he had any idea what it meant (he knew what red and white meant, and he didn’t especially care to know any more than that). Aziraphale, who knew this as well as Crowley did, snorted and threw him an affectionate glance over his shoulder as he turned toward the kitchen. “I’ll get the glasses.”

“What’s the occasion?” Crowley asked, sitting up straighter, absently twisting the neck of the bottle between his fingers.

“The occasion,” Aziraphale said, with no small touch of grandness, “my dear, is that it is nine o’clock and our son is asleep.” Reaching up on his tip-toes, he got two glasses from the highest shelf, the nice ones he refused to risk using when Adam was up and about. Crowley gave an appreciative whistle.

Aziraphale sat down on the couch, setting the glasses on the coffee table with a clink and a wink towards Crowley. “Pour?”

Crowley did, handing one glass to Aziraphale and taking the other for himself. When he leaned back, Aziraphale shuffled closer, his cheek coming to rest against Crowley’s shoulder. “Our son, huh?” Crowley murmured, tilting his head on top of Aziraphale’s.

“Yes, well…” Aziraphale shrugged in a poor affect of nonchalance. “He does call us his fathers. I don’t see why we shouldn’t return the favor.”

“ _Return the favor_ ,” Crowley mimicked. “Right. That’s all it is, angel, I’m sure. I bet he’ll really appreciate it.”

“Oh, shove off.” Aziraphale took a long drag of his wine. “He is, though. You know.”

“Is what? Our son?”

Aziraphale nodded, his cheek rumpled against Crowley’s sleeve, and breathed out a long sigh. “It’s… it’s permanent,” he said quietly. “It’s, you know, _real_. He’s our son. Permanently. Doesn’t that ever scare you?”

“I don’t ever get scared,” Crowley said. Aziraphale glared at him, and he scrunched his nose up in response. “’Course it does, angel. I think it scares everyone, that maybe you’ll do it wrong and screw ‘em up for good. Ours sorta came already screwed up, though, being the spawn of Satan and all.”

“He is not screwed up,” Aziraphale said automatically, darting his eyes to their room, as if Adam might overhear and get his feelings hurt. “He’s _special_.”

“Right, you try telling him that in a couple years, why don’t you?”

“I will,” Aziraphale said primly, holding up his chin. He caught Crowley’s eye and held it for a moment before breaking into giggles, pressing his forehead firm against Crowley’s shoulder. Crowley brought one arm around him, pulling him closer, rooting his hand in Aziraphale’s curls. Aziraphale sighed contentedly and closed his eyes.

There weren’t a lot of moments of peace with a six-month-old around, but the ones you were lucky enough to get were precious.

* * *

“C’mere,” Crowley coaxed, hands outstretched. He was crouched on the living room floor, across from Aziraphale and Adam, the latter of whom was standing precariously on his own two feet, with generous support from Aziraphale. “You can do it, darling. Come to Dad.”

“Fascinating strategy,” Aziraphale said drily. Crowley glared at him, and he grinned and switched gears, cupping Adam’s back with one hand. “That’s right, you can do it, Adam. It’s just one foot in front of the other. Quite simple, although your father has yet to fully master it,” he added, glancing up at Crowley, who flipped him off. “Crowley! Not around the baby!” 

“He’ll never know what it means,” Crowley said dismissively. He waggled his fingers in a beckoning gesture, reaching out for Adam. “Can you come here? Do you think you can manage that?”

Adam looked at Crowley, wrinkled his nose, and took one faltering step forward, then another, and then promptly fell face-first onto the rug and started wailing.

Crowley quickly scooped him up and set him back upright. “That was incredible, peanut!” he said approvingly, tickling Adam’s chin. “Excellent work. You got two whole inches! We’re very proud, aren’t we, angel?” 

“Oh, terribly,” Aziraphale said, brushing a hand over Adam’s short shock of hair. The baby cautiously sniffed as he stopped crying, instead making grabby hands for his papa.

Crowley scoffed. “Favoritism,” he said scathingly.

* * *

The first year of the Antichrist’s life passed much in this manner: quietly, peacefully, and strangely. 

Neither Crowley nor Aziraphale had ever been big on birthdays; nor had any of the heavenly hosts. There had been some noise upstairs about having a celebration of the Earth’s birthday, a year to the day after it was created, but that had been swiftly abandoned when they realized they’d have to do that _every_ year. That was an extraordinary amount of years. That was six thousand birthday cakes. The thought was abominable. 

Crowley and Aziraphale had figured along the same lines. There really wasn’t a point to counting, when you got down to it: 5,112 didn’t feel all that different from 5,111, and once you’d got to that point, you were downright tired of birthdays, and the humans hadn’t even figured out how to make good cake yet.

Adam, however, was a human, and he didn’t have an unlimited number of birthdays—if they did their jobs right, he’d have a hundred or so, probably, and if they screwed it up, he’d get eleven, and then—

Well. No one really knew what happened then, but Aziraphale figured there would either be no birthday cake or quite a lot of it.

For his first birthday, they decided a cake would be good enough, in lieu of a party. It wasn’t like he’d remember it, after all, and it also wasn’t like they had a great menagerie of friends to invite; they weren’t exactly buzzing socialites. It was really just the two of them and Adam, which suited all of them fairly well for the moment. Adam was tucked into his high chair, drumming gleefully to a rhythm of his own design on the tray.

“Can you blow out your candle?” 

He gave Aziraphale a long look, like he was trying to figure out if he was kidding him. Aziraphale mimed the desired motion. Adam’s stare remained blank. 

“We might have to help him out a little bit, angel,” Crowley drawled. 

“Right. Yes. Can you do it with us, sweetheart?” Aziraphale mimed the motion again, and this time Adam begrudgingly mimicked it, puffing his cheeks out. “Perfect!”

“Needs some work,” Crowley said at the same time.

Aziraphale glowered at him out of the corner of his eye for a second, then turned back to their son with a clap of his hands, beaming. “Alright! Do it with us, okay?”

Adam obligingly pursed his lips and pushed out a stream of air which sounded resoundingly like a fart, as Aziraphale and Crowley blew the candles out. They both cheered. “Happy birthday, my dear boy,” Aziraphale said, leaning in to press a kiss to Adam’s head. “Here’s to many more.”

Adam’s first act as a one-year-old was to fully bury his hands in his slice of cake and smear it all over his face. It seemed fitting somehow.


End file.
